Nobody told Margaret Ham that chain-smoking was going to kill her. Or if they did, she wasn’t listening. She turns 100 on Saturday.
Ham, from Basingstoke, England, celebrates her centenary on June 27, and her granddaughter, Rachael Matthews, has been sharing the lifestyle behind the milestone with the Mirror. Alongside the cigarettes—up to 40 a day, never stopped, not planning to—Ham drinks Yorkshire Tea by the gallon (full-cream, gold top, Rachael would like you to know that semi-skimmed is not an option), and starts every day with butter and marmalade, the butter layered on thick.
Rachael’s mother died at 52 after trying a health kick. “Nan was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to keep going!’” Rachael told the Mirror. A hundred years in, it’s hard to argue with her.
Ham was born in Bristol in 1926 and grew up through World War II, with a bomb shelter that the neighbors were reportedly jealous of. She later joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at 18, serving two years before settling in Kilburn, where she met her husband. She has survived considerably worse than a cigarette or forty.
Meet the 100-Year-Old Woman Who Still Smokes 40 Cigarettes a Day
The New England Centenarian Study, one of the most comprehensive studies of extreme longevity ever conducted, found strong evidence for a significant genetic component to surviving past 100. People who reach that age appear to carry protective variants that allow them to survive with habits that would be fatal for most. Margaret Ham may simply be built differently.
Research on centenarian populations has found that smokers are exceptionally rare among people who reach 100, and when they do appear, they usually fare worse health-wise than their non-smoking counterparts. Ham, who lives independently and gets around with a walking stick she’s reportedly not above using as a weapon, is an outlier within an outlier.
She turns 100 on Saturday. Rachael, who visits daily and spends every Sunday with her grandmother, is asking people to send birthday cards, addressed to “Margaret” or “NanNan,” to 35 Borodin Close, Basingstoke, RG22 4EN. After a century of wartime, cigarettes, and watching the health-conscious come and go, the least the woman deserves is a full mailbox.
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